It's common that I read a question and say, "OK, I don't need to see it again."
Then I always think, "Hmm... maybe there is a 'hide' button on the question, so that I won't see it again in my favourite tag list so that I'll be able to focus on the remaining questions which are either new or known by me and interesting to me?" But, unfortunately, the button is never there.

Request: Let's implement that button! No need to clutter the database with it: It looks to me like a perfect candidate for HTML5 local storage. Purely client side.

The fun part is, it can be implemented separately from SO, as a bookmarklet or just an addon for PersonalizedWeb / GreaseMonkey. But I believe it would be indeed useful to have it there available for everyone.

I like it, but I would also recommend to keep a datetimestamp and remove them after so many hours, for two reasons (decrease the size of localstorage // re-show them to you after so long a period of time, when the frontlist should've updated anyways)
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jcolebrandJan 2 '11 at 18:01

4 Answers
4

I disagree about doing it client side being the best approach, though. I access SO from multiple computers, so having the "hide" data stored locally would be annoying as each computer (really, each browser) would have a different set of hidden questions.

On the other hand, doing it client side does make it possible for "anyone" to go and implement it, which certainly increases the chance that there'll actually be an implementation.

Another approach would be to use a feed reader (like Google Reader) that'll let you hide "read" items. This would work better if the feeds on SO were better. For example, if I go to my "interesting" tab on SO, autodiscovery shows a feed available, but the feed isn't for my "interesting" questions -- it appears to just be the recent questions feed. Anyway, once you have a feed you can just use your feed reader to keep track of which questions you're already done with.

To use this, install the Personalized Web extension, go to the extension's options page, click "Add a new rule", and paste the above in the "Add HTML" box. You may also want to change the "Match URLs" regexp to only apply to Stack Exchange sites.
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Richard HansenApr 1 '12 at 18:27

This won't work. Greasemonkey creates a sandboxed environment which basically renames the global scope to unsafeWindow and creates a new global scope for the script. A quick workaround is to stringify the function you want to run in the global scope and add it as a script tag to the document.
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Jan DvorakJun 27 '13 at 10:59

@JanDvorak Can you elaborate? The above seems to work for me. I can hide a few questions, hit refresh, close and restart Firefox, and the questions are still hidden, and reappear when I click the unhide link. Which aspect won't work then? PS.: Feel free to edit/extend my answer!
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tobias_kJun 27 '13 at 11:04

Weird... I thought it wouldn't, because $ would not be visible from the userscript scope. Can you test in Chrome/Tampermonkey? If it breaks there, I think I've got a compatibility report to fill. If it doesn't, I'll need to reevaluate my previous tests.
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Jan DvorakJun 27 '13 at 11:08

Thanks for the script. The 'userscripts' site does not open and it says its under heavy load. Would you please upload the script some where else so that it can be accessed. Thanks again.
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talegariJul 22 '14 at 3:11